Systems engineering is a field of engineering that focuses on how to design and manage complex engineering systems over their life cycles. Systems engineering deals with the systematic planning, design, and construction of highly complex, large-scale systems. Systems engineering ensures that all likely aspects of a project or system are considered, and integrated into a whole.
The need for systems engineering arose with the increase in complexity of systems and projects, in turn exponentially increasing the possibility of component friction, and therefore the unreliability of the design. When speaking in this context, complexity incorporates not only engineering systems, but also the logical human organization of data. At the same time, a system can become more complex due to an increase in size as well as with an increase in the amount of data, variables, or the number of fields that are involved in the design.
Despite the enormous effort put forth by system engineers to find the most promising design, inferior or partially infeasible designs may still be designed in complex systems. A Model-Based System Engineering (MBSE) approach is typically employed to mitigate such consequences and allow adequate coverage of the design-space. MBSE is the formalized application of modeling to support system requirements, design, analysis, verification and validation activities beginning in the conceptual design phase and continuing throughout development and later life cycle phases.